Right Story at the Right Time

I've been thinking about presence, and what "the right story at the right time" might mean. I was thinking about this later on, sometime after class, when Mr. Novak (David? Master Novak? I wonder if he'd let us call him Master Novak) brought up that "if you get any two stories together in a room, they will have something to say to each other." I thought about that, and that had me a bit confused, because I was thinking, "If that's so, then what about 'the right story at the right time?' Wouldn't that make any story the right story at the right time?"

I had been thinking about what made a story the "right" story, getting caught up in trying to find patterns in story-order today according to genre, trope, subject matter, tone, themes, and the like. But I think that while any of those things might contribute to making a story fit somewhere within a conversation, it's not any of those things that actually makes a story the right story at the right time. I think it might be more about presence, and what Patsy Rodenberg calls "the desire, need, care [or] passion to touch someone with words." Basically, it's caring enough to be present, and feeling when you have something to say that contributes. There are no rules as to when this might be--it's not about being able to match genre, or subject matter, or any overt characteristic of the story at all. Any two stories could potentially border each other.

One interesting effect of this is that when you're trying to tell the "right story at the right time," you're acknowledging a frame outside the frame of your own story and performance, and you shape your performance to contribute to that frame. For instance, Chris told his story with a different tone, with a bit more gravitas (despite the lightness), because he followed Bob's story. With this mindset you're not performing in isolation, you're performing in context. And I think this mindset might be a great skill to try to carry over to storytelling performance in general--in a way, we're always performing in context. We might not always be following another teller, but we're always (ideally) having a conversation with the audience. Knowing how to listen, to pick up on what is framing their experience, to find a way to tell within that context, might be a way to turn performance into conversation.